


In Vino Veritas

by Avia_Isadora



Category: The Borgias (Showtime TV)
Genre: Drunken Kissing, Episode Tag, Established Relationship, F/M, Older Man/Younger Woman, Truth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:34:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27819076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Avia_Isadora/pseuds/Avia_Isadora
Summary: The Romans said "in wine, truth."  Both the Pope and Guilia are quite drunk by the end of the party following Lucretia's wedding.  Fortunately, he has her to help him to bed.
Relationships: Rodrigo Borgia | Pope Alexander VI/Giulia Farnese
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	In Vino Veritas

**Author's Note:**

> This goes in Season 1, Episode 4 "Lucretia's Wedding" following the afterparty.

“I won’t let you fall.” His arm over her shoulders has less to do with revelry than with not wanting to fall on his nose. The Pope’s daughter is well and truly married. The party has stretched into the wee hours, the bride long since asleep and all decent guests departed. Which is to say the remaining guests include cardinals, actresses, courtesans, and the Pope’s sons. It’s time for the Pope to depart while he can still walk. Giulia Farnese helps him out, his arm over her shoulders. Truth to tell, the world is tilting a bit for her as well, like walking on the deck of a ship. She’s quite certain where the floor is. Giulia is sure of things like that. They tend to be immutable facts.

The stairs are a bit trickier, lurching around a bit. Or perhaps he’s lurching around. She certainly isn’t. But they manage. His rooms are cool and dark after the overheated atmosphere downstairs. He waves the attendants away. It’s certainly an education for the fourteen-year old boys who scatter, closing the doors fast behind them. Both of them have a great many buttons and neither of them are careless with their clothes. Undressing is less an exercise in sensuality than it is in fumbling with fastenings the other can’t reach while trying not to knock each other over. The buttons down her back are particularly complex. Another man might simply rip them loose, but he carefully undoes each one, if at great length.

Chemise-clad, she falls onto the bed, a mistake as it makes the world lurch. Giulia holds onto a bolster until it stops. He’s landed behind her, and wraps his arm around her waist, drawing her back against him, holding her the same way she’s holding the bolster. “I don’t usually drink like this,” she says.

“Nor do I.” He gets his other arm beneath the pillow beneath her head. “It’s hard enough to stay one step ahead of the wolves stone sober.”

“I see that,” Giulia says. “This makes you too vulnerable.” He cannot be careless. He can never be careless, except perhaps locked in a closed room with her. 

“Tomorrow there will be the wolves again, but tonight….” His voice trails off. “It was a good party. Everybody likes a good party.”

“It was,” she says. Giulia does not say that everybody liked it. Some decidedly did not. She never says she agrees with him when she doesn’t, but she is good at holding her tongue. There will be hell to pay for this party tomorrow and in the weeks to come, but she might let him enjoy the dregs of it. There will be time enough for him to face the consequences. “The Pope has an orgy” will not sit well in some circles. She really should not have sat in his lap to watch bawdy theater.

His mind seems to have wandered in some of the same directions. “We don’t remember all that in Plautus,” he says thoughtfully.

“I don’t think so, no.” The troupe certainly camped it up. 

“All those bare breasts.” 

“Yes.” She absolutely doesn’t say, “That’s what comes of putting Juan in charge of the play for his sister’s wedding.” She does not criticize the Pope’s sons. He’ll reach the conclusion that perhaps Juan could have been more appropriate tomorrow.

His hand gropes at her clumsily. “I have found some breasts.”

“So you have.” She smiles as he sleepily nuzzles her neck. This won’t go far, as drunk as they both are, but it’s nice to have him there, affectionate and vaguely filthy. His beard is rough against her neck, but his lips are warm. Too much truth bubbles to the surface. “I hate weddings,” Giulia says.

“Ah well.” He waves about the hand around her waist. “An honorable estate and all that. Still,” he pauses, “I’m glad I didn’t have to marry.”

“Would that every woman were so fortunate,” Giulia says rather more sharply than she intended. She fears for Lucretia with that humorless Sforza, but there is nothing she can say to anyone that will help. She left Cesare talking to the groom and hopes that Cesare’s particular brand of impressing on someone that his sister is a treasure will bear more fruit than her gentle warnings could. She knows the sort, if not the man. Sforza will pay no attention to her. He may pay attention to a dangerous young man who cares for his sister’s happiness.

“Ah, my Giulia,” he says, his arm tightening around her waist. He knows something of her own marriage by now.

So she must lighten it. She turns onto her elbows, so she can see his face. “But if all women were happy in their marriages, what would churchmen do for women?”

He laughs, as she meant him to, reaching up to gather her in against his shoulder. “We should be bereft, my love.”

Giulia’s breath catches. It’s just an iteration of endearment, and yet. 

“We are not eunuchs, God knows,” he says.

“Yes, I think that’s clear.” She’s had ample reason to know, but he’s trying to make some point in a rather drunk and rambling way, and he’s sticking to it like a terrier with a stocking.

“But it’s true that my clerical skirts free me from the demands of…” He waves a hand around as though the words hovered above him. “…proving my manhood with my fists at every opportunity. A priest cannot duel for honor…” Cesare does, but Guilia doesn’t think that bears mentioning at the moment. “…nor is he expected to beat his women to prove his superiority. We are more than men and less than men. We do not have to marry for the good of the family.” As his children do, of course. But he is entirely aware of the irony. 

“And you may know that I am here because I want to be, not because I was sold to you,” Giulia says. It slipped out. She did not intend to say such a thing. Wit is the only armor. “They say the Hussites reject celibacy for the clergy. Tell me,” she asks with a toss of her hair, “do they have celibate clergy in Bohemia? I have never seen any in Rome.”

He leans his head back against the pillow, one of those unfathomable expressions on his face. “We…aspire. We fail.” She settles on his shoulder, waiting. “We intended to be chaste when we were elected. But….” He vaguely waves his free hand.

She remembers how nonplussed she was at their first meeting, in the confessional. She thought he would snap at the promised treat like a fish after a fly. Instead he temporized, shifting about uncomfortably, advancing and retreating in a verbal skirmish that seemed entirely random. She had left thinking she’d failed at seduction, cursing her inexperience at the game, that she could not reel in her catch. It had not occurred to her that she actually tested oaths he meant to keep. “Oh dear,” Giulia says quietly. “I suppose I scotched that.”

He is too tactful to say that if she had not, someone else would have. He would have fallen into some woman’s bed before long. It might as well have been hers. “It is our failing, not yours.” He kisses her to show he regrets little. As always, it’s sweet and sensual, the kind of kiss one drowns in, and she slides her arm around him, pulling him closer, her hand inside his shirt at the back of his neck. She lets her kiss say all the things she will not.

At last they come up for air. She sorely needs some. The world is spinning somewhat. Too much drink, Giulia thinks. Their mouths part, but their eyes do not, and there is that strange expression again. “There is something ancient in your eyes,” she says quietly. It comes and goes, this oddness. She doesn’t know what to make of it. “Something so old.” 

He tilts his head, his eyes on hers, so deep, so compassionate and rueful, as though he knew her to the bottom of her soul, held her to his breast like a dove and desired the very ground she walks on. Like shadows fleeing across water, his expression changes. “And then you smile,” she says. She kisses him again. This desire goes deeper than bones, deeper than flesh, to answer craving for oneness with craving. There is no gift she can give him that will suffice.

This time when they part, he lies back on the pillow. The part of her that’s used to reading his body says that they are both the worse for drink. He looks tired. She strokes his hair. “Are you alright?”

He closes his eyes. “My little girl has gotten married. I feel every bit of my age.” He shakes his head ruefully. “It makes one think.” 

His hair is threaded with white where she touches. He has decades on her, something she never forgets for long. Time is always chasing her. She knows that whether his interest wanes or not, she will lose him. It is nature’s inevitable law. 

She is still searching for the right words when he opens his eyes. “I wonder,” he says, “How I will be remembered.”

She knows. She knows the power of those who put words on paper, who make memory in quiet scriptorums. After all, Cicero has endured a millenium and a half, Catiline despised by each generation. She knows what they say about him. Some of it is even true.

Giulia meets his eyes, holding him with her gaze. “I hope,” she says slowly, “that in the natural course of things I will outlive you by many years.” Her eyes do not let go. “And I will remember you with love.”

She has not spoken that word before, and he shakes his head, drawing her in again. And there is the kiss, made desperate now. It says what she cannot: do not leave me, do not fail, do not let go, do not ever, ever leave me. She will show him with her hands that clutch at him, holding the back of his head, her fingers tangled in his hair.

Long and slow and tender, but their bodies are fuzzled by drink and it is the darkest hour of the night. After some time they part. He’s not frustrated, just beginning to sober up. He lies back on the pillow and she comes to his side again. “And tomorrow the wolves,” he says. “Always snapping at my heels. Always hungry wolves who need a kick in the teeth.” He runs his hand over her tangled hair. “You steady me, my love.”

Twice is not an accident. He doesn’t have accidents with words. “I will be here,” Giulia promises. She pulls the heavy embroidered coverlet over them both. “Whatever comes. I will be here. I won’t let you fall.” 


End file.
